Chris Hedges's Blog, page 183

This Is How We Defend Immigrants From Trump

There is seemingly no limit to the cruelty President Trump inflicts on immigrants. Just days after a horrific mass shooting claimed the lives of 22 people in the immigrant-rich border town of El Paso, Texas, the Trump administration carried out the largest workplace raids in the nation’s history. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents rounded up nearly 700 people in cities across Mississippi on Wednesday.

At a meat-processing plant run by Koch Foods Inc. in the small town of Morton, those who were rounded up filled three buses. A local news outlet described how a “tearful 13-year-old boy whose parents are from Guatemala waved goodbye to his mother, a Koch worker, as he stood beside his father.” The report described how “some employees tried to flee on foot but were captured in the parking lot.” So far, it is not known what will happen to children whose parents were wrenched away.

The raids ought to be seen as part of the Trump administration’s family separation policy designed to literally traumatize children and parents into leaving the U.S. and deter others from seeking refuge here. At a time when agency heads are telling lawmakers that immigrant detention centers are so overcrowded they are unable to provide proper food and hygiene to detainees, why is Trump adding hundreds more people into the mix? The answer is obvious: because immigrants are the No. 1 enemy in Trump’s America. The pain of immigrants is a weapon in Trump’s hands.

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680 Arrested in Largest Immigration Raid in a Decade



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The Largest Migrant Shelter Is a House of Horrors, Report Finds



by Ilana Novick

The shooting in El Paso has to be viewed through the same lens. Trump has attempted to assert plausible deniability in his connection to the massacre, refusing to acknowledge his role in fomenting the hate that drove the shooter to spray dozens of bullets into a border-town store. He took umbrage at former President Barack Obama for saying, “We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments.” Trump retorted childishly on Twitter, “Did George Bush ever condemn President Obama after Sandy Hook. President Obama had 32 mass shootings during his reign.”

But of course, Trump couldn’t admit the fact that mass shooters during Obama’s presidency did not echo the 44th president’s rhetoric. In his online manifesto, the El Paso shooter described a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” And in his discussions of the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump used the word “invasion” at least two dozen times. That is an ideal word to signal to his followers that it is open season on immigrants.

Trump seems to have a two-prong strategy: first, to goad government agencies to persecute immigrants through formal mechanisms, and then to downplay his role in giving his supporters the impression that they are free to attack immigrants through informal means, such as verbal and physical abuse and hate crimes.

Just a few months ago, at a political rally in Florida, Trump asked the crowd that had gathered: “How do you stop these people? You can’t,” he said, referring to immigrants seeking refuge in the U.S. A member of the audience yelled back, “Shoot them.” Instead of expressing horror and chastising the audience member for suggesting murder, Trump smiled and joked that “only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.” To this, the crowd cheered wildly. Given the overlap between Trump’s supporters and gun owners in the nation, it was inevitable that Trump’s stoking tactics would result in actual violence.

In writing about Trump’s role in the Tree of Life Synagogue attack in Pittsburgh last year, Pacific Standard editor Jared Keller explained that the president’s signaling “is known in political science circles as ‘stochastic terrorism,’ the use of mass communication to ‘incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.'”

Trump’s incitement of terrorism has been quite effective. In late July, his FBI director, Christopher Wray. admitted to Congress during a hearing that “a majority of the domestic terrorism cases we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.” In the wake of the El Paso shooting, a top-level source told CNN, “Homeland Security officials battled the White House for more than a year to get them to focus more on domestic terrorism.” What’s more, “The White House wanted to focus only on the jihadist threat which, while serious, ignored the reality that racial supremacist violence was rising fast here at home. They had major ideological blinders on.”

Trump supporters continue to back the president, not in spite of his racist rhetoric and incitement of violence, but because of it. It is difficult to admit that we live in a country that has a racist faction so big that it is capable of delivering an election—and perhaps a reelection—to a demagogue. It is a notion that is paralyzing to many of us. But we must not only confront this fact, we must work to make racism an ugly notion once more.

Texas congressman Joaquin Castro has the right idea. After the El Paso shooting, he in his district and listed all 44 of those who had given the Trump campaign the maximum allowable donations this year. In writing about how “[t]heir contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as invaders,” Castro’s goal was to shame Trump’s enablers and link them to the violent outcome of the president’s words.

Predictably, there was hypocritical pushback from Republicans. Sen. Ted Cruz replied, saying that Castro’s tweet amounted to “hateful partisan rhetoric,” and accusing him of “vilifying & doxxing” Cruz’s constituents. Cruz made no mention of Trump’s hateful partisan rhetoric. Like all Republican lawmakers who support the president, openly or implicitly, Cruz is part of the problem and deserves to also be shamed.

It is crucial that Trump’s critics couch their criticisms in nonviolence. All it takes is one incident of violence or one call for violence from the left to deliver a rhetorical victory to the right, no matter how statistically insignificant it may be in comparison to the right’s actual and rhetorical violence. Much has been made recently of protesters’ angry and violent statements outside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s house. It matters little if such statements are the exception rather than the rule, given that the right-wing megaphone disproportionately amplifies them. The strongest moral high ground is one that is steadfastly nonviolent. It makes the verbal shaming of Trump’s racist enablers far more effective.

In the meantime, direct action—including confronting the government machine of immigrant raids, detentions and deportations—must continue unabated. A powerful example of this are the nationwide actions by members of the Jewish organization Never Again Action and the immigrant rights group, Movimiento Cosecha, who have surrounded and confronted ICE offices and detention centers in various cities. The historical memory of Jews in challenging the persecution of immigrants and working alongside immigrant groups is exactly the type of solidarity we need in this moment.

A similar solidarity has been on display by Japanese-Americans whose ancestors survived the internment camps during World War II. Immigration lawyers also are hard at work around the nation in forming community legal defense teams  to stop deportations, and mayors of sanctuary cities have welcomed refugees.

Taken together, these actions are throwing wrenches in Trump’s large-scale project of persecution, even if it seems that we are in the midst of a losing battle for the soul of the nation. We are going to require deep reserves of patience, persistence and militant, nonviolent resistance to Trump, Trumpism, racism, white supremacy and violence. That is the only way we can win.

Billionaire Trump Supporter Stephen Ross Can’t Have It Both Ways

Donald Trump built his career and publicity machine in New York City real estate. While he remains a divisive figure in the industry, he still has connections with powerful, wealthy developers. One of them, Related Companies owner Stephen Ross, is planning a lavish Hamptons fundraiser for his re-election campaign. The Washington Post reports that ticket prices begin at around $5,600 and climb to $250,000 for the opportunity to have a private roundtable discussion with the president.

In addition to being a real estate developer, Ross is the owner of the Miami Dolphins football team and has investments in a number of restaurants and fitness brands, including Equinox and SoulCycle. When news broke that Ross is hosting the fundraiser, angry Equinox and SoulCycle members, some of them celebrities, took to social media to encourage their followers to cancel their memberships.

Model and television host Chrissy Teigen, who has over 11 million followers tweeted:

everyone who cancels their equinox and soul cycle memberships, meet me at the library. bring weights

— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) August 7, 2019

Actor and comedian Billy Eichner told his followers:

Just contacted @Equinox to cancel my membership after many years. Money talks, especially with these monsters. If it’s too inconvenient for u to trade one LUXURY GYM for another, then you should be ashamed. (No disrespect to the many wonderful employees at my local Equinox). Bye!

— billy eichner (@billyeichner) August 7, 2019

Director Michael Moore also weighed in:

That’s it! Just cancelled my @SoulCycle membership! https://t.co/YvoG4pQv7w

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) August 7, 2019

Buzzfeed’s Julia Reinstein reports that in forums on the Equinox’s mobile app, “tons of members spoke out against Ross and said their farewells to the gym.” In one post, Reinstein wrote, “[the] member shared the famous photo of a 2-year-old immigrant girl crying as her mother was searched at the border, superimposed with the words ‘IT’S NOT FITNESS. IT’S HATE.’ ”

Miami Dolphins wide receiver Kenny Stills also voiced his displeasure at his team’s owner:

Trump’s America: Gun Violence and the War on Immigrants

The country was rocked by two mass killings this past weekend. The first was in El Paso, Texas. The slaughter of 22 people in El Paso’s Cielo Vista Walmart was an act of a white supremacist. A manifesto he allegedly posted online shortly before the massacre echoed President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the alleged shooter wrote.

Late that night in Dayton, Ohio, throngs of people were enjoying the Oregon entertainment district when another white man in his 20s opened fire, killing nine people in about 30 seconds before police killed him. Among those he murdered was his sibling. Unlike the El Paso killer, the Dayton shooter left no “manifesto” to explain his motivation for the rampage, but had in the past expressed violent fantasies, an obsession with mass shootings, and classmates said he kept a rape and kill list while in high school. Misogyny is often linked to mass killers.

These horrific events have spurred political momentum for a change in the broken gun laws that have for far too long made the United States a virtual free-fire zone.

President Trump read a speech from a teleprompter Monday, rambling on about mental health and violent video games, largely toeing the NRA line. While he did suggest support for a national “red flag” law, allowing court-ordered confiscation of guns from a person deemed a threat to others or to him- or herself, Trump said, “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.” In fact, people who suffer from mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of gun violence than perpetrators of it. He also called for the death penalty for mass shooters.

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Trump May Be a White Nationalist, but American Racism Is Bipartisan



by Paul Street

















Democrats Have Facilitated Trump's Racist Attacks



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While the Dayton shooter is dead, the El Paso shooter turned himself in to a police officer not far from the scene of the crime. His online declaration began, “I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.” In fact, how New Zealand’s elected leader, and society at large, responded to that massacre last March of 51 Muslims should be the model for what happens in this country.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the world’s youngest elected leader. After the Christchurch massacre, committed by a single gunman armed with an arsenal of legally purchased semi-automatic weapons, Ardern immediately pushed a ban on almost all semi-automatic and military-style weapons through Parliament. “Fifty people died and they do not have a voice. We in this house are their voice,” she said. In less than a month after the massacre, the assault weapons ban became law in New Zealand.

Trump did call Ardern to express condolences. Ardern said of the call: “He asked what offer of support the United States could provide. My message was sympathy and love for all Muslim communities.” When addressing her nation in response to the massacre, Ardern said: “Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may even be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not. They have no place in New Zealand.”

Before departing from the White House to visit survivors in Dayton and El Paso Wednesday, Trump refused to take back his use of the word “invasion,” which he has repeatedly used to describe the arrival of immigrants and asylum seekers at the southern border. According to Media Matters for America, “Between January and February, President Donald Trump’s Facebook page ran about 2,200 ads referring to immigration as an ‘invasion.'” His use of the word “invasion” was invoked as justification by the killers in El Paso, Christchurch and in Pittsburgh last year. There, the shooter entered a synagogue and gunned down 11 Jewish worshippers who he believed supported “invaders.”

The response in New Zealand was to ban assault and semi-automatic weapons, and to embrace diverse immigrant communities. In the United States under Trump, the opposite is happening. Next month, laws will take effect in Texas loosening gun restrictions — for example, forbidding the banning of guns in schools and churches. Then, on Wednesday, the day Trump was ostensibly consoling wounded survivors in Dayton and El Paso, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted the largest single-state workplace enforcement action ever, arresting 680 people at several Mississippi food-processing plants, accusing them of being undocumented.

The scourge of guns and the war on immigrants continue.

(c) 2019 Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

 

GOP Halts Twitter Spending After McConnell’s Account Is Locked

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—The Republican Party, the Trump campaign and other GOP organizations said Thursday that they are freezing their spending on Twitter to protest the platform’s treatment of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Twitter temporarily locked McConnell’s campaign account Wednesday after it shared a video in which some protesters spoke of violence outside his Kentucky home, where he is recovering from a shoulder fracture.

The social media platform said in a statement that users were locked out temporarily due to a tweet “that violated our violent threats policy, specifically threats involving physical safety.” The statement did not indicate exactly how long the account was frozen, saying only that it was temporary. The account was active Thursday, but no longer contained the tweet.

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Social Media Misinformation Campaigns Are 'Big Business' Worldwide, Study Finds



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The Courier-Journal reported one protester said McConnell should have broken his neck instead of fracturing his shoulder; another spoke of violence when responding to a reference about a hypothetical McConnell voodoo doll.

In an interview Thursday on Louisville radio station WHAS, McConnell said the decision to ban his campaign account was indicative of the “left-wing tilt of these big companies,” which he said suppress speech on social media they don’t agree with but did nothing when people were calling him “Massacre Mitch.”

Some Twitter users applied that label to the senator for blocking consideration of House legislation imposing new regulations on guns. McConnell called the label “obviously an invitation to violence.”

Twitter and other social media companies say they have no political bias.

National Republican Congressional Committee Executive Director Parker Hamilton Poling said her organization was halting Twitter spending “until they correct their inexcusable targeting of @Team Mitch.”

“We will stand firmly with our friends against anti-conservative bias,” Poling said.

The national Republican Party and President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign had projected spending $300,000 to $500,000 this month on Twitter, according to one GOP official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorized to publicly discuss the plans.

The GOP’s criticism of Twitter comes as Trump and McConnell are being pressured to endorse gun control measures after last weekend’s mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, that left 31 people dead.

Trump’s denigration of minorities and immigrants has prompted many to blame him for contributing to an anti-immigrant atmosphere.

McConnell has long led Republican efforts in the Senate to stifle gun control proposals and is resisting Democrats’ cries to interrupt Congress’ recess and approve new restrictions.

___

Fram reported from Washington. Associated Press reporter Dylan Lovan in Louisville, Kentucky, contributed to this report.

Ralph Nader: Big Pharma Must Be Stopped

Congress can overturn the abuses of Big Pharma and its “pay or die,” subsidized business model for its drugs.

Big Pharma’s trail of greed, power, and cruelty gets worse every year. Its products and practices take hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S. from over-prescriptions, lethal combinations of prescriptions, ineffective or contaminated drugs, and dangerous side-effects.

The biggest drug dealers in the U.S. operate legally. Their names are emblazoned in ads and promotions everywhere. Who hasn’t heard of Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, and Novartis? Big Pharma revenues and profits have skyrocketed. In 2017, the U.S. consumers spent $333.4 billion on prescription drugs.

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Big Pharma, Bad Policy Are Keeping the World From Ending AIDS



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There are no price controls on drugs in the U.S. as there are in most countries in the world. Senator Bernie Sanders just took a bus tour to a Canadian pharmacy where insulin cost patients one tenth of what it costs them in the U.S. Yet, remarkably, drug companies, charted and operating in the U.S., charge Americans the highest prices in the world. This is despite the freebies our business-indentured government lavishes on Big Pharma. The FDA weakly regulates drugs, which are supposed to be both safe and effective, before they can be sold. Who funds this FDA effort? The drug industry itself— required by a law it has learned to love.

The Big Pharma lobby doesn’t always get what it craves. In the nineteen seventies, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, produced two paperbacks for a wide television audience (e.g. he appeared on the Phil Donahue Show). They were titled, Pills That Don’t Work and Over-the-Counter Pills that Don’t Work. Because of Dr. Wolfe’s tireless efforts, hundreds of different pills were removed from the market, saving consumers billions of dollars and sparing them the side-effects.

Big Pharma’s greatest strength is its hold over Congress. That is where it gets its huge bundle of subsidies and monopolistic privileges. During the first term of George W. Bush, the drug companies got the Republicans and some spineless Democrats to forbid Medicare from negotiating volume discounts with the drug companies, as the Pentagon and VA have done for years. Big Pharma had over 1,200 lobbyists swarming over Capitol Hill to get these handcuffs on Uncle Sam. Lobbyists combined with campaign cash donated by Pharma industry players sealed the deal.

Your Congressional representatives gave the drug giants much in return: Lucrative tax credits to pay Big Pharma to do what they should do anyway—engage in research and development. Drug companies are profitable recipients of taxpayer-funded government research on developing new drugs – and then given monopolies that enable them to impose sky-high prices, even when the purchaser is the very government that funded the invention of the new drugs in the first place.

The drug industry has also made sure there are no price controls on their drugs—whether gifted to them by NIH or developed by drug companies internally. The absence of price controls accounts for new “blockbuster drugs” going for $100,000, or higher, per patient per year. Many drug prices generally increase faster than inflation.

Greed is infinite for Big Pharma. In addition to tax credits, free drug R&D (compliments of the federal government), and no price restraints, the drug companies have moved much production to China and India. No antibiotics are manufactured in the U.S.—a clear national security risk to which the Pentagon and Trump should pay heed. Two new books, China Rx and Bottle of Poison, document the safety risks of poorly inspected labs in those countries exuding pills into your bodies without your minds being told of “country of origin” on the label.

The great hands-on humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, operating in 70 countries often under dangerous armed conflicts, lists “Six Things Big Pharma Doesn’t Want You to Know,” in its recent alert letter.

They are:

Costs of developing new medicines are exaggerated tenfold or more.
You’re paying twice for your medicines—first as taxpayers and second as consumers or through your government programs.
Drug companies are not that good at innovation. About two thirds of new drugs (called “me-too drugs”) are no better, and may be riskier, than the ones already in pharmacies. But they are advertised as special.
Monopoly patents are extended by clever lawyers to block more affordable generic versions. This maneuver is called “ever greening.”
Pharma bullies low and middle income countries like South Africa, Thailand, Brazil, Colombia, and Malaysia that try to curb its rapaciousness. These drug companies use trade rules and the U.S. government towards their brutal goals.

In the nineteen nineties, a small group of consumer advocates led by Jamie Love, Bill Haddad, and Robert Weissman persuaded Cipla, an Indian drug firm, and Ministries of Public Health to lower the price of AIDS medicines from $10,000 per patient per year price down to $300 (now under $100). The U.S. drug companies were quite willing to let millions die because they couldn’t pay.
Big Pharma always says they have to have large profits to pay for R&D and innovation. Really? Why then do they spend far more on stock buybacks (one of the metrics for executive compensation), on marketing and advertising than on R&D? Dr. Wolfe exposed this malarkey years ago.

Yet exposure has not stopped the worsening behavior of Big Pharma. Good books by Katharine Greider (The Big Fix) and Dr. Marcia Angell (The Truth About the Drug Companies) are devastating critiques of Big Pharma’s practices. Despite this, the books reach small audiences and are brushed off by the drug giants. Big Pharma is able to ignore these books because it controls most of Congress—candidates rely heavily on the industry for campaign budgets.

But the American people outnumber the drug companies and only the people can actually vote come election time.  Focused voters mean more to politicians than campaign money. The August recess for Congress means your lawmakers are back home having personal meetings. Visit them and make known your demands against the “pay or die” industry. Tell them your own stories.

Or better yet, make them come to your town meetings. Remember: “It’s your Congress, people!”

One galvanizing move by an enlightened billionaire could establish a 20 person advocacy group on drug pricing, focusing on Congress and mobilizing citizens back home. Its effect would be decisive for taming the drug industry’s gouging. Any takers: if so contact Public Citizen at medsaccess@citizen.org.

What America Can Learn From Dick Gregory

One afternoon in New York City in the spring of 1964, I marched at the head of a small civil rights demonstration, one of the few white people in the group. I was carrying a watermelon. It was a Dick Gregory joke.

To say the least, not everyone liked that joke, but I thought it was hilarious, a jab by the hottest comedian in the country at one of the oldest racial stereotypes. Some of the black demonstrators in that little parade felt that Gregory’s version of guerrilla theater (in which I was a bit player) diminished the seriousness of the occasion—and they said so. Some of the white bystanders had another opinion entirely. In words that couldn’t have been more blunt, they suggested I was a traitor to my race.

More than a half-century later, as Gregory’s jokes and accomplishments are being revisited, that watermelon bit still seems brilliantly mocking to me. Yet it is also quaint, almost antediluvian, symbolic of a once-thrilling sense of progress.  The current struggle against racism faces an orchestrated resistance led from the White House. The racists on the twenty-first-century sidewalk are emboldened, having found a malicious leader impervious to comedy. Too many others realized too late that Donald Trump was no joke after all. And now they’re squabbling among themselves over such important but often diverting topics as cultural appropriation, white male privilege, and plain old bad taste—instead of uniting to fight a truly dangerous enemy of equality and democracy.

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3 New Studies That Will Make You Rethink Systemic Racism



by Lee Camp

Nigger, the title of the book Greg (as most of us called him then) and I wrote together in that distant year (and his autobiography), is even more controversial than it was then and so is my own race. People question the appropriateness—even the right—of a white man to write about, as well as with, a black man. The book, published in 1964, has never been out of print and this year, for the first time, a trade paperback has been issued along with an audio version. A documentary, a feature film, and a formal biography are on their way, much of it thanks to the energy generated by Greg’s son Christian, a Washington, D.C., chiropractor.

Greg, who died in 2017 at 84, is now gaining the full recognition he long deserved as a pioneer of political black comedy who sacrificed a superstar career on the ramparts of 1960s civil rights activism. In these last years, he’s risen into the pantheon of America’s most famous satirical commentators alongside Will Rogers and Mark Twain.

I met Greg on the evening of September 16, 1963. His publisher set up the appointment. He had signed a contract for a rats-to-riches autobiography to capitalize on his new fame as a comedian and then rejected every writer the publisher sent around. Nearing the bottom of the barrel, they came up with a 25-year-old New York Times sportswriter who, to be honest, was more interested in meeting this sudden sensation than actually writing a book involving the—for me—then-exotic worlds of comedy and racial politics.

An Education

When I arrived at his hotel suite that first time, Lillian, his wife, and Jim Sanders, his gag writer, told me he wasn’t seeing anyone. But young and full of myself, I just barged into his room. He was on his bed, curled in a fetal position, clothed only in his underwear, crying. I sat down and asked him what was wrong.

He slowly rolled over and glared at me. “Don’t you read the papers?”

“Sure,” I said. “I work for one.”

“Didn’t you read about the four little girls who were murdered yesterday in a Birmingham church?”

“That was terrible,” I said. “Now about this book…”

But he had rolled back, even as he continued to talk, this time to the wall: “How could the white man be so evil as to kill little girls who weren’t even demonstrating for their civil rights? You people are the racial cancer destroying America. You stunt the lives of children, break up families, you have the power to wound the innocent just by calling them ‘niggers.'”

Because I was a reporter, I began taking notes, but mostly I listened, fascinated. I was in the presence of a soul in rage and pain, hardly the cool 30-year-old hipster who had become the first black comedian to make it in major white nightclubs. His one-liners—”‘Leven months I sat-in at a restaurant, then they integrated and didn’t even have what I wanted”—were already being repeated as social commentary, not to speak of uncomfortable truths in that world before social media. (“We won’t go to war in the Congo ’cause we’re afraid our soldiers will bring back war brides.”) At $5,000 a week, he was then being hailed as the Jackie Robinson of topical comedy.

Late that night, I finally got up to leave and, to my surprise, he asked me to come back the next day so we could start writing the book.

It went badly from the beginning. He was sometimes an hour or more late for an interview session and when I complained, he’d say, “I can tell you been waitin’, baby, you sound colored.” He always called me “baby.” He couldn’t seem to remember my name. His diatribes against white America were based on strong arguments and solid facts, but they were hardly the human stuff of autobiography. I was fascinated. For me, it was an education, but I soon realized it was fruitless to continue.

So after about two weeks of sporadic sessions, on a day he showed up three hours late, I hit him with a prepared monologue. I told him that I didn’t need to put up with an irresponsible, selfish fool trying to hang me up in reverse prejudice. In fact, I declared pompously, the only thing I didn’t have against him was the color of his skin. I marched out to the elevator. He followed me and got in. On the way down he said, “Your name’s Bob Lipsyte, right?”

“Too late,” I replied.

He said he was going to have a sandwich at the hotel coffee shop. Would I join him? I figured I might as well get something out of all this.

While we ate, he kept repeating my name. When we finished, he said, “Let’s go back up. I think we’re ready to write a book. A real book, one they’re not expecting.”

And it was terrific. For the next few months, usually very early in the morning, after a club date, in a hotel room curtained against the dawn, he would lie in bed and take me into the pit of his St. Louis childhood. We cried and laughed about this skinny welfare case named Richard Claxton Gregory, born on Columbus Day, 1932, who fantasized that school closed in honor of his birthday. When he was hungry enough, he told me, he ate dirt. He started telling jokes to keep the bullies at bay. He talked about his “monster,” by which he meant that combination of ego and ambition that drove him to become a high-school and college track star and then a headliner on the honky-tonk “chittlin’ circuit” of black nightclubs.

The monster was ready on January 13, 1961, the night the Chicago Playboy Club called him as a last-minute replacement. And it was the same monster that refused to be sent home when the club manager panicked moments before Greg was to go on stage after realizing that the place was packed with white southern conventioneers. Greg thanked the first heckler for calling him “Trigger”—he said he always admired Roy Rogers’ horse—and he asked the second one to keep using that word because his contract stipulated $50 extra every time it was spoken. He killed that audience. Playboy owner Hugh Hefner was called out of bed for the second show and gave him a long-term contract.

The Monster Needed More

But success on stage wasn’t enough for the monster. Between club dates and appearances on TV’s top-rated The Tonight Show, where he successfully demanded to be the first black comic to sit on the couch beside, and actually talk to, late-night host Jack Paar, he ended segregation in a Maryland prison by refusing to perform unless black and white prisoners were in the same audience. He also helped free a falsely accused black man from a southern jail and he always made sure there were black waiters in the clubs in which he performed.

As his celebrity grew, any civil rights demonstration for which he was scheduled to show up could count on television news crews following him, which usually lessened the odds of police brutality against the demonstrators. So he began to believe it was his obligation to show up. So he started missing club dates and then began to lose them when bookers realized that the nightclub stage was not his priority.

By this time, we were well into writing the book, whose working title was Callus on My Soul. I thought it sounded too gospel-y, however, for a funny, gritty, remarkably candid personal story. At the time, though, neither of us could think of anything else.

Usually, after a club date and before we settled into our all-night taping sessions, we would have a post-midnight dinner, often with friends of his or other entertainers. Greg, a drinker and smoker who was overweight, would order huge amounts of food for everyone and taste everything. A childhood marked by hunger had left him with an obsession with food, which he talked about incessantly.

Late one night in Chicago, after a gig at the nightclub Mister Kelly’s, he began to riff about opening his own restaurant. It would be small and luxurious, only one sitting per table per night, five waiters, and an orchestra. The diners would deserve all this, because the name of the restaurant—in neon on the door—would be Nigger.

“Every white man in the South will be giving me free publicity,” he said, working himself up in his typical fashion. “We could bust that word. It wouldn’t have the power to hurt us anymore. Anytime anybody said, ‘Nigger,’ it would be about something really fine.”

I think that may have been how we got the idea for the title of his autobiography. So much for Callus on My Soul, which he used for a later memoir.

The publisher, Dutton, was not amused, but Greg stood his ground. He threatened to take the book back and they were, in the end, somewhat mollified by his dedication:

“Dear Momma—Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they are advertising my book.”

In those years when, of course, it seemed inconceivable that a black president, no less a first lady, would ever grace the White House, he would make endless jokes about that title: “Sent a copy of my book to President Johnson. About time there’s a nigger in the White House… Lady Bird Johnson’s been reading my book at night, so now she goes to bed with a nigger.”

The White Interpreter

In 1964, when the book was done and off to the publisher, I finally asked him the obvious question: Why, in the world, had he chosen me, a white man, to help him tell the story of his life? His response was quick and straightforward and surprised me. He had picked me, he said, partially because I seemed so open and interested in his story, not one that I might want to tell, but above all because I was white. Black folks, he assured me, would understand his life. They had already lived it. White folks, on the other hand, needed an interpreter, someone who could make sure the story was told in ways they could relate to.

I’ve held on to that explanation through 55 years of self-questioning and, of course, questions from others. Sometimes, I’ve thought about that watermelon, too. I wish, back then, I had asked Greg exactly what he had in mind besides a racial joke in which I was proud to participate, even if there was a hint of mockery (of me) and humiliation in it. Didn’t whites deserve it? Beyond that, wasn’t carrying the watermelon a symbolic way of sharing a terrible burden that had been the essence of this country since the first enslaved black set foot on these shores so many hundreds of years ago? Wasn’t it, at that far more hopeful moment, a way of reminding white people that we—and the history that went with us—were all in this together, even as racists tried (as they and President Trump still do) to divide us?

The book was published in 1964 to good reviews even as Greg’s career as a stand-up comic was swirling down the drain. His TV and nightclub income dropped—he lost a reported $100,000 in bookings in 1964, a fortune then, and twice as much in 1965—because he so often left those bookings in the dust, rushing off at the last moment to one dangerous place after another with the Huntley-Brinkley Report news crew close behind. He was accused of doing it all for publicity, even after being badly beaten in Birmingham, Alabama, and shot in the leg while trying to calm a crowd during the riots in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in 1965.

The comedic path Greg blazed would be followed by Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and Chris Rock, even as the civil rights movement settled into its endless, grinding struggle. Our book kept selling but obviously never came close to busting that word, our title, which has become a kind of Tourette’s tic for rappers and basketball players (often modified as “nigga”). Greg and I agreed that the politically correct alternative, “the n-word,“ seemed both coy and somehow even more objectionable in its implication that the original is really just too powerful to say aloud.

Sometime in the late 1970s, he and I began to see less and less of each other as his food obsession took a sharp turn into non-smoking, non-drinking vegetarianism, and frequent fasting. He was constantly on the road. His true home, his son Christian once told me, was an airport terminal. He became a fervent advocate of proper nutrition, which, he insisted, was the foundation on which battles against racism could be fought. Only healthy people, he would say, have the strength to make substantive change. Then that sly, conspiratorial smile of his would break out on his face and he’d ask: How come the government spends so much time and money regulating vitamins without ever banning cigarettes?

Two years ago, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I stood before two audiences in two days, one made up of mostly middle-aged African-Americans who wanted to share memories of Greg, the other mostly African-American teen-agers hosting a 50th birthday party for The Contender, a young adult novel with a black teenage protagonist that I wrote back in 1967 and which they had read in school. I never mentioned the watermelon to either audience, but in both cases that moment and the melon weighed on my mind. I still felt haunted by that symbol of American racial hell and the unresolved question: What did it really mean then? What does it really mean now?

Without prompting, I told the older crowd how we had come up with the title of that book and why Greg picked a white man to tell his story. There was a lot of nodding and murmurs of assent in the audience. They understood. I hadn’t ever been appropriating his story. I had been helping to explain it to an often-clueless white readership.

Emboldened, the next day I posed a question to the kids.How did they feel about a white guy writing a novel about a black kid? They looked confused. They had loved the book, they said, related to the characters, what did it matter? One boy said that their teachers told them they could write about anything they wanted, including aliens from outer space.

I have to admit I was touched because I instantly knew that Greg would have dug that answer. Time to put the watermelon down, I thought, cut it up, and share it.

Harry Reid Urges Democrats to Nuke the Filibuster

Former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a message for his party: if you retake the upper chamber, kill the filibuster to tackle the climate crisis.

Reid, who represented Nevada in the Senate from 1987 to 2017, made the comments to The Daily Beast reporter Sam Stein in an interview published Thursday.

“[T]he number one priority is climate change,” said Reid. “There’s nothing that affects my children, grandchildren, and their children, right now, more than climate.”

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But Reid’s prescription relies on a number of things going right for Democrats, wrote Stein:

Reid’s admonition represents the most notable case of a party elder arguing that global warming needs to be the Democrats’ number one agenda item. But it is also premised on three decidedly significant—and to varying degrees, unlikely—developments: that Democrats retake the White House, that they retake the Senate, and that 50 of those Senators decide they are comfortable changing the rules of their chamber to get rid of the filibuster.

As Common Dreams reported in 2013, Reid was criticized by progressives during his leadership for not doing enough to kill the restrictive parliamentary maneuver.

Bottom line, ending the filibuster on legislation is inevitable, Reid said.

“It is not a question of if,” Reid told Stein. “It is a question of when we get rid of the filibuster. It’s gone. It’s gone.”

U.N. Climate Report Warns About Impact on Food Supply

GENEVA—Human-caused climate change is dramatically degrading the Earth’s land and the way people use the land is making global warming worse, a new United Nations scientific report says. That creates a vicious cycle which is already making food more expensive, scarcer and less nutritious.

“The cycle is accelerating,” said NASA climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, a co-author of the report. “The threat of climate change affecting people’s food on their dinner table is increasing.”

But if people change the way they eat, grow food and manage forests, it could help save the planet from a far warmer future, scientists said.

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Earth’s land masses, which are only 30% of the globe, are warming twice as fast as the planet as a whole. While heat-trapping gases are causing problems in the atmosphere, the land has been less talked about as part of climate change. A special report, written by more than 100 scientists and unanimously approved by diplomats from nations around the world Thursday at a meeting in Geneva, proposed possible fixes and made more dire warnings.

“The way we use land is both part of the problem and also part of the solution,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a French climate scientist who co-chairs one of the panel’s working groups. “Sustainable land management can help secure a future that is comfortable.”

Scientists at Thursday’s press conference emphasized both the seriousness of the problem and the need to make societal changes soon.

“We don’t want a message of despair,” said science panel official Jim Skea, a professor at Imperial College London. “We want to get across the message that every action makes a difference.”

Still the stark message hit home hard for some of the authors.

“I’ve lost a lot of sleep about what the science is saying. As a person, it’s pretty scary,” Koko Warner, a manager in the U.N. Climate Change secretariat who helped write a report chapter on risk management and decision-making, told The Associated Press after the report was presented at the World Meteorological Organization headquarters in Geneva. “We need to act urgently.”

The report said climate change already has worsened land degradation, caused deserts to grow, permafrost to thaw and made forests more vulnerable to drought, fire, pests and disease. That’s happened even as much of the globe has gotten greener because of extra carbon dioxide in the air. Climate change has also added to the forces that have reduced the number of species on Earth.

“Climate change is really slamming the land,” said World Resources Institute researcher Kelly Levin, who wasn’t part of the study.

And the future could be worse.

“The stability of food supply is projected to decrease as the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events that disrupt food chains increases,” the report said.

In the worst-case scenario, food security problems change from moderate to high risk with just a few more tenths of a degree of warming from now. They go from high to “very high” risk with just another 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) of warming from now.

“The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” NASA’s Rosenzweig said. “Just to give examples, the crop yields were affected in Europe just in the last two weeks.”

Scientists had long thought one of the few benefits of higher levels of carbon dioxide, the major heat-trapping gas, was that it made plants grow more and the world greener, Rosenzweig said. But numerous studies show that the high levels of carbon dioxide reduce protein and nutrients in many crops.

For example, high levels of carbon in the air in experiments show wheat has 6% to 13% less protein, 4% to 7% less zinc and 5% to 8% less iron, she said.

But better farming practices — such as no-till agricultural and better targeted fertilizer applications — have the potential to fight global warming too, reducing carbon pollution up to 18% of current emissions levels by 2050, the report said.

If people change their diets, reducing red meat and increasing plant-based foods, such as fruits, vegetables and seeds, the world can save as much as another 15% of current emissions by mid-century. It would also make people more healthy, Rosenzweig said.

The science panel said they aren’t telling people what to eat because that’s a personal choice.

Still, Hans-Otto Pörtner, a panel leader from Germany who said he lost weight and felt better after reducing his meat consumption, told a reporter that if she ate less ribs and more vegetables “that’s a good decision and you will help the planet reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Reducing food waste can fight climate change even more. The report said that between 2010 and 2016, global food waste accounted for 8% to 10% of heat-trapping emissions.

“Currently 25%-30% of total food produced is lost or wasted,” the report said. Fixing that would free up millions of square miles of land.

With just another 0.9 degrees F of warming (0.5 degrees C), which could happen in the next 10 to 30 years, the risk of unstable food supplies, wildfire damage, thawing permafrost and water shortages in dry areas “are projected to be high,” the report said.

At another 1.8 degrees F of warming (1 degree C) from now, which could happen in about 50 years, it said those risks “are projected to be very high.”

Most scenarios predict the world’s tropical regions will have “unprecedented climatic conditions by the mid-to-late 21st century,” the report noted.

Agriculture and forestry together account for about 23% of the heat-trapping gases that are warming the Earth, slightly less than from cars, trucks, boats and planes. Add in transporting food, energy costs, packaging and that grows to 37%, the report said.

But the land is also a great carbon “sink,” which sucks heat-trapping gases out of the air.

From about 2007 to 2016, agriculture and forestry every year put 5.7 billion tons (5.2 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide into the air, but pulled 12.3 billion tons (11.2 billion metric tons) of it out.

“This additional gift from nature is limited. It’s not going to continue forever,” said study co-author Luis Verchot, a scientist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia. “If we continue to degrade ecosystems, if we continue to convert natural ecosystems, we continue to deforest and we continue to destroy our soils, we’re going to lose this natural subsidy.”

Overall land emissions are increasing, especially because of cutting down forests in the Amazon in places such as Brazil, Colombia and Peru, Verchot said.

Recent forest management changes in Brazil “contradicts all the messages that are coming out of the report,” Pörtner said.

Saying “our current way of living and our economic system risks our future and the future of our children,” Germany’s environment minister, Svenja Schulze, questioned whether it makes sense for a country like Germany to import large amounts of soy from Latin America, where forests are being destroyed to plant the crop, to feed unsustainable numbers of livestock in Germany.

“We ought to recognize that we have profound limits on the amount of land available and we have to be careful about how we utilize it,” said Stanford University environmental sciences chief Chris Field, who wasn’t part of the report.

___

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein reported from Washington. Frank Jordans contributed from Berlin.

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For more Associated Press stories about climate change, go to https://www.apnews.com/Climate

Dozens Arrested in Mississippi Raids Are Released

JACKSON, Miss.—Dozens of immigrant workers have been released a day after being detained in the largest immigration raid in a decade in the United States.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials say 680 people were arrested in Wednesday’s raids.

But immigration lawyers say that by Thursday morning, about five busloads of people had been released.

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The terms of the workers’ releases were unclear. It also was unclear whether any of those released were determined to be living in the country legally. ICE officials did not return telephone calls Thursday morning.

Officials had said Wednesday that they would release detainees who met certain conditions, such as pregnant women or those who hadn’t faced immigration proceedings previously.

Karla Vazquez-Elmore is a lawyer representing arrested workers. She said even those not arrested are terrified.

House Democrats Hoarding Cash to Ward Off Progressive Upstarts

WASHINGTON—Somewhere out there, the next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lurks. So wary House Democrats are amassing campaign war chests to scare off progressive upstarts from challenging them in primaries — or trounce them if they try.

A look at 41 incumbent House Democrats who face potential 2020 party primary opponents shows 16 have already stockpiled over $1 million in campaign funds. The figures from Federal Election Commission reports for the first six months of this year show that 20 raised over $500,000 during that period alone.

That’s not stopping challengers from targeting powerful committee chairmen and other well-financed incumbents, though the hurdles they face are clear.

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So far only four Democratic challengers in these races have at least $100,000 socked away. The most is $352,000 by business consultant Marie Newman, who’s waging a primary rematch against Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, one of Congress’ most conservative Democrats. He has double her cash on hand, though she’s out-raised him so far this year.

“If you don’t have the money to fight an air war, you fight a ground war,” Monica Klein, a New York consultant who works with progressive Democrats, said of challengers who often lack money for TV commercials. “You try to out-organize your opponent and have those conversations at the doors, on the phone, face to face.”

Many challengers have barely started their campaigns but the early figures underscore a cold reality. Even with today’s energized and increasingly well organized progressive movement, incumbents’ fund-raising advantages — plus their name recognition and connections — are usually insurmountable.

The list of Democratic incumbents facing primary challenges will grow considerably, but most of those races won’t be truly competitive.

Ocasio-Cortez rocketed to influence and celebrity and is now a New York congresswoman after unexpectedly toppling 10-term veteran Rep. Joseph Crowley in their 2018 Democratic primary. Crowley, who was seen as potentially the next House speaker, spent over $3 million, multiples of Ocasio-Cortez’s expenditures.

A political unknown, Ocasio-Cortez relied on contributions of $200 or less for two-thirds of her money. Accumulating numerous small donations has become the gold standard of progressive campaigns, since givers can make repeated contributions and become campaign volunteers. So far this year, no major challengers in the races studied have raised AOC-like proportions of small donations.

Upsets like Ocasio-Cortez’s are rare. She, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and two Republicans were the only primary challengers to oust any of the 376 House incumbents seeking re-election last year, meaning 99% of incumbents were re-nominated. Since World War II no more than 5% of incumbents have lost primaries, which happened in 1992.

Even so, leading Democrats are urging lawmakers to be aggressive fund raisers.

“My advice to any incumbent in this volatile environment: Take nothing for granted,” said former Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., who once led House Democrat’s campaign organization.

Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., chairs the House Ways and Means Committee and has a liberal voting record. He’s banked nearly $4 million but 30-year-old Alex Morse, the mayor of Holyoke, recently announced his candidacy anyway, asserting that Neal isn’t doing enough for western Massachusetts.

Morse, who is openly gay, hasn’t reported raising any money yet and says he’ll need at least $1.5 million for his effort. He says he’s rejecting money from corporate political action committees, which are dirty words among progressives, and says he will do “town halls, knock on doors, show up in living rooms of people who have never met me.”

Said Neal, “I’m going to take the race seriously.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler of New York, a leader of Democratic investigations into President Donald Trump, faces opponents including Lindsey Boylan, 35, a former state economic development official. Boylan has already banked $240,000, impressive for a challenger but a quarter of Nadler’s cache.

Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has $187,000 cash on hand, a modest amount for his Bronx and Westchester County district. The 16-term veteran, who says he prefers waiting until election years to raise money, could face a significant challenge in his racially mixed area from Jamaal Bowman, a black educator. Bowman, Morse and several others are backed by Justice Democrats, the progressive group that recruited Ocasio-Cortez to run last year.

Even No. 2 House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland faces liberal challengers, though he’s flashed his fundraising chops by collecting nearly $1.3 million in just six months.

Moderate incumbents who could be natural targets for progressives are also taking no chances.

Second-term Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., a leader of a bipartisan House coalition that seeks middle ground on issues, has nearly $5.7 million socked away so far, raising more than $1.7 million of it this year through June. Both figures surpass any of the other Democrats examined, and Gottheimer’s lone Democratic challenger has reported having no money.

Three other Democrats centrists have each banked at least $2.7 million and far outraised their challengers: Reps. Bill Foster of Illinois, Henry Cuellar of Texas and Kurt Schrader of Oregon.

The few incumbents reporting little cash on hand include Reps. Alcee Hastings of Florida, Bobby Rush of Illinois, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and Seth Moulton of Massachusetts. Gabbard and Moulton are running for president and could shift funds to their House campaigns if they abandon their presidential bids.

Underscoring the difference incumbency can make, a report Ocasio-Cortez filed three weeks before her 2018 primary showed she’d raised just $300,000. She’s now a fundraising giant.

In her first six months in Congress, she reported raising nearly $2 million. While that’s effectively a warning sign to anyone considering running against her, she suggested in an interview that she may use it to help fellow liberals, perhaps some challenging House colleagues.

She said she is “extremely dedicated to keeping the Democratic majority, but also to growing the progressive plurality” among House Democrats.